William deB. Mills

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Israel’s Conflict Resolution Strategy

Continuing the development of a model for analyzing Iranian-Israeli relations…

Nations, regimes, politicians are always unsatisfied, so the method of choice for addressing their dissatisfactions is a key determinant of behavior (rather than, for example, the mere fact of their being dissatisfied). Therefore, the “Conflict Resolution Strategy” parameter merits particular attention.

A simple technique for starting to measure a regime’s conflict resolution strategy is to put dated evidence along the Conflict Resolution Axis. This technique is designed to provide straightforward visual clues to answer questions such as, “Is the strategy consistent over time?,” “Is the strategy tightly centered?,” “Are there multiple strategies?” Laying the evidence out in a structured, visual manner also has the great value of facilitating discussion about its value, completeness, and clarity. If a clear trend is discovered, then charting the movement on the scenario landscape opens the door to scenario tracking and lays a trail of explicit evidence in support of the trend that is identified.

In this case, Israeli officials are shown to support an extraordinary range of forceful methods (murder, ethnic cleansing, unprovoked military attack) to resolve all sorts of conflict (peaceful scientific progress on the part of opponents, the mere existence of non-Jewish communities with different opinions, organized political opposition, the acquisition of weapons). The conclusion, based on the evidence given (gathered non-scientifically from Israeli media since the end of the Gaza attack), is clear: so far, the Israeli elite appears to remain very strongly committed to force as its preferred method of resolving conflict.

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Author: William deB. Mills

PhD, political science, U. of Michigan; observer of global affairs; retired from U.S. Government (last position Director of Methodology, NIC); specialist in applying nonlinear methods to studying the future of international relations, focusing on the Western-Islamic confrontation